Opposite of Sycophant

All I've wanted to do this week was come home and send ANGER ANGER HATE HATE HATE out into the internet unknown, but I felt this was probably unproductive and would not necessarily be helpful. So, instead, I channeled my rage into writing. Thus, I give you:

The Opposite of Sycophant

By: Me. 

Forcibly spending a week with you

was like attending a lecture on Jerk

You showed off its malice, its bally-hoo

in mincing comments regarding my work

I skimmed the lecture’s whole outline

having taken this class times before

it’s clear you think you hide it with saccharine

but your charms and your tricks, I abhor

I can usually hide indignation,

and play right along with the games,

but with you I can’t hide my frustration

you’re Satan finessing his flames

I can’t stand your insincere candor,

with students and colleagues alike,

it’s clear that you want them to pander

to your ego that rivals Third Reichs’ 

You imply that I’m stupid and lazy

veiling thinly the truth of your joke

through questions irrelevant and crazy

that make my eyes seem appealing to poke.

What made your curriculum so bitter

worse than most assholes’ I’ve known

was your critique that my notes, they did fritter,

any story or use on their own

You told me to read what you wrote

about the team’s patients and plans

You asked that I pare down, not emote

you’d never seen something so rambling, so bland.

This hurt more than the barbs you had crafted

since it wasn’t intentionally mean

for you attacked all that had lasted

of the me that med school wiped clean.

You couldn’t have known that you’d done that,

but I know it’d make your short self seem tall,

to realize you won in our combat,

with an offhanded comment so small. 

Though I failed all your quizzes by guessing,

and despite all the spits and the swings, 

This week did teach me one lesson:

You’re a dick and you don’t know a thing.

Clueless

I can't tell you how many times I watched the movie Clueless growing up.  I can tell you that if we had time to kill waiting in an amusement park line I could recite you the first twenty minutes without stopping to breathe.

So, naturally, when I needed some audio accompaniment to my knitting this weekend, I chose the best movie I could enjoy without watching on Instant Netflix: Clueless.

When I was younger and the TV used to do that thing where Pay-Per-View was just a channel and it played the same movie 24/7 until it switched to a different movie, I would just watch movies over and over and over. My Dad is a local sports announcer and we got all the zillion channels for free, so, why not? 

We would also tape (on VHS)(VHS! How weird is that!?) the movies we liked so that when the 24/7 week was over we could continue to watch them again and again and again. And by we I mean me.

I did dupe some friends and family members into joining my couch potato-ness. In fact, I remember sitting next to my mother watching Clueless and feeling only marginally uncomfortable when it was the cafeteria scene where Dee asks Tai if she's ever done it in water. I remember my pre-adolescent self wondering... do what? Do what? And concluding that I must've missed something in the earlier conversation. Them talking about doing their homework or clipping coupons, and how crazy it would be to do poolside. Or something.

Needless to say, this time around the jokes made a whole lot more sense.

The portion where Amber tells the gym teacher that her plastic surgeon doesn't want her engaging in any activities where balls fly at her nose and then Dee quips, "Well, there goes your social life," was not in fact a nod to Amber's intramural dodgeball league that I assumed she competed in on the weekends. 

Nor does an "herbal refreshment" refer to an all natural breath mint. 

Though, to be fair to pre-adolescent me, Dee and Cher didn't get the reference either. "Well, we don't have any tea, but we have Coke and stuff."

"No shit, you guys got coke here?!"

Again, I thought... oh, poor Tai! She really is clueless! She doesn't know what Coke is!? Joke's on you past me. Joke's on you.